[openbeos] Re: A very interesting 3D desktop prototype...

> A friend sent this to me and I found it very interesting:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ
> 
> Obviously this is not something Haiku would even consider until R2,
> but I have to admit it seems pretty slick and intuitive.
I saw the video, and it makes a *great* demo. 

IMO, though, that's all it can be is a really cool demo, because of how 
much it duplicates a metaphor. Metaphors (like the desktop) are a way 
to relate the familiar to someone unfamiliar quickly. They are good so 
long as they are useful, but at some point, they break down. While it 
does give the user choice in how to organize files, it still forces the 
user to do it somehow. Not only that, some of the features that they've 
implemented (like different ways of stacking items in the pile) are 
implementations of what would be a Real Life hack. I'm not personally a 
person to organize by piles, but, unless I miss my guess, it would be 
for keeping certain items of a group within that group while also 
making it stand out by another means. There are better ways of doing 
this.

I guess it seems to me that by following the desktop metaphor so 
closely, they seem to have made something which doesn't have to be 
difficult more complicated than before. The secretary at the school 
where I work literally has hundreds and hundreds of files, most of them 
stored in My Documents hierarchy or on the desktop. Now imagine if they 
were all in that workspace in the window and you want to find one file 
in particular. Even with the different sorting and organizing features 
that they showed, it would still take much longer to find something 
than with what is currently in place with the whole My Documents thing.


--DarkWyrm

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